Dragon Award for Best Alternate History Novel went to “Uncharted” by Kevin J. Anderson, KJA and Sarah A. Hoyt.

As one of the Sad Puppies, Sarah sacrificed a great deal of her status and probably a good chunk of her friends in science fiction circles along with some significant measure of her peace of mind by bucking the CHORFs of the science fiction SJWs. Thanks to the Sad Puppies a goodly number of people were reintroduced to readable science fiction long after they believed it had all been reduced to boring unreadable marxist, intersectionalist, message fiction, drivel. Thanks to the Puppies and especially Larry Correia the Dragon Awards were founded and have provided a sane alternative to the self-parody that the Hugo Awards have devolved into. Requiescat in pace.

So good for them and if you are looking for good stuff to read check to see who was nominated for the Dragons http://awards.dragoncon.org/2018-ballot/ . But for pity’s sake don’t even glance at the list of Hugo nominees. No man can hope to look into the gorgon’s face and survive!

Maybe next year the winning book will be a time travel adventure where a brave trans-gendered woman goes back in time and warns Hillary not to set up the server in her bathroom and also stops John Podesta from using the password “password” on the DNC e-mail system. And then she wins the Miss America pageant, marries George Clooney and cures breast cancer but not prostate cancer. Grand Slam!

Larry Correia comments on WorldCon’s descent into virtue signaling madness. And one of his commenters linked to a blogpost that detailed the depths of intersectionality based idiocy that has the pink sci-fi whackos madder than a hornet’s nest. If you don’t have the patience to read this boobosity I’ll just summarize by saying that the genocidal crime in question was someone on the WorldCon committee referring to one of the participants using the pronouns he and him instead of E and em. You can’t make this stuff up!

Personally, I think this is great. They have completed the transformation of the Hugos into the LGBTQ Outrage Awards. No further interference in its trajectory is needed or possible. This should bring retail sales of Hugo winners’ books into single digits within the current decade. It’s quite an accomplishment.

Now, you’re gonna have to bear with me for a bit. This will be a rambling seemingly incoherent rant. But I’ll try by the end to bring it back to the point.

Over the course of the last few years I have become aware of the range of “philosophies” and personalities that exists on the right wing. I do not have an exhaustive knowledge of all the players, nor do I want or need to. I think it would be fair to say these personalities run the gamut from extremely sober to raving lunatic. And over the course of the last few years this has given me reason to pause and consider how or if I fit in with this spectrum of individuals. Surprisingly, I have learned that not all the serious individuals are right and not all of the nuts are wrong. Now, that doesn’t make it easy to commune with the lunatics. In fact, most of the time you probably shouldn’t. Lunatics tend to the mercurial and don’t always play well with others. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hear what they are saying. And by the same token, the sober guys may be charming and polite individuals but listening to them may be counter-productive. Especially if they are extremely clever. Sophistry can be highly entertaining and unfortunately also highly deceptive. To my mind that is kind of how we got where we are now. Cheerleaders for supposedly conservative ideas convinced a lot of people that the Bushes and John McCain and Mitt Romney knew what the word conservative means. That was sophistry.

So, the people you agree with logically aren’t the same as the people you enjoy listening to. What that means is that you tend to have to compartmentalize your relationships. Some people you can discuss your political beliefs with easily and other people you can’t. Some people are fun to discuss zombie movies with and others only want to discuss the actual apocalypse. It’s not the most comfortable arrangement imaginable. It’s sometimes annoying. And it’s the way things are going to be for the foreseeable future. Trying to avoid this reality will lead to trouble. For example, suppose you have a good friend who likes the same sports you do. The two of you can go to a ball game anytime and sit up in the stands and talk all day about Joe Dokes’ batting average or who the best relief pitcher is. It’s great. But if you try discussing politics with him you’ll end up in a shouting match and probably won’t want to get together for months. Very not great. And alternatively, you might know someone either in real life or on the web who you agree with politically almost completely. The two of you can discuss politics and even cooperate on political action and other projects. A mutually beneficial relationship. But otherwise you have nothing in common. You like country music he’s a gangsta rap enthusiast. You like science fiction he reads books on playing golf. Absolutely no common ground. What about these two scenarios?

What about them? There’s nothing wrong with either one. They reflect the reality of the world around us. You accept that division.

Now, of course, the best case scenario is when both spheres align. Now you can talk about baseball and the revolution at the same time. Better still, you can start a fantasy baseball league for right wingers! And for something like baseball or hockey or NASCAR you might do quite well lining up people who fit both sides of the equation. No problem!

But what if your interest is photography or science fiction? Now it’s not so easy. If you happen to be a photographer and also happen to not be a left winger you’re probably aware that the majority of photographers both professional and amateur skew pretty hard left. As with a lot of the “creative” professions these people seem to be steeped in a bohemian, urban culture that is extremely hostile to right-wing values and individuals. When I first got interested in photography I experienced this hostility over and over at a number of photography websites. It was both on a subliminal level and also on a purposeful, even confrontational basis. Whenever anything in the news offended the denizens of these sites it inevitably was dragged through the forum pages in the most strident and challenging terms. Basically, it was a public challenge to deny the libel being foisted. And interestingly if you succeeded in presenting a logical argument that was too convincing, the powers that be on the site were very likely to step in and either erase your posts (or force you to erase them) or ban you from the site altogether. To say this was a sorry state of affairs would be an understatement. The only way to coexist (what a loaded word) in such an environment would be to keep your mouth shut and ignore these virtue-signaling spasms. You can only imagine how much fun that would be. But there was no other way. Eventually I found one website that had a policy that I found commendable. They specifically forbade divisive discussions that involved non-photographic topics. So, no political, racial, religious or ethnic discussions were allowed to drift into an argument. It could be a little restrictive but it totally avoided the type of nonsense I was discussing above. Interestingly, I could still tell which individuals would be the worst offenders if it was allowed. They were always the ones being censured by the moderators. And it never was anyone on the right being stopped. Always rabid leftists. You could tell they thought it was highly unfair that they were not allowed to lecture us all on the topic of the day. I have to confess I took a good deal of delight in posting complaints against the worst offenders whenever I could. But it was still only a grudging allowance of what was obviously a despised minority opinion. I believe the site owner was a right-wing guy who found that, to avoid alienating the lefties, the best he could do was try to avoid all flash points. He knew that the demographics were against him and he settled for this uneasy truce. I still have great respect for the way he maintained that arrangement. It was the best environment that existed for right-wing photographers that I ever found.

Another of my interests is (or was and now is again) science fiction and fantasy stories. Growing up in the nineteen sixties and seventies I can remember finding all the classic books by the Golden Age authors and just eating that stuff up. And there was all kinds of range to the quality of the stories. Some were great and some were pretty bad. And even as a kid I knew that. And yet, I could still enjoy even the bad ones because at least they were of a kind. They involved science and adventure and space flight and alien creatures and time travel and inter-dimensional mumbo-jumbo and especially cover art involving scantily clad green-skinned women. Who could ask for anything more? But as time passed and it moved into the late seventies something started to change. Fantasy books weren’t about orcs and dwarves. They were about nature spirits fighting back against modern western civilization to protect Mother Gaia. And science fiction wasn’t about humans exploring the galaxy but sexually confused individuals exploring their various orifices. And along with all these “improvements” was the overarching message that the most important problem that science fiction and fantasy needed to solve was how can we make books that no straight white men would want to read?

And I’ll be the first to admit they succeeded with a vengeance. For a few years I still picked up new books and gave them a try. But without a doubt something bad had happened. It was like all the nit-wits who had made the sixties into a stinking hippie nightmare went off and got MFA’s and started writing sf&f. And worse still they had taken over the publishing houses and the awards ceremonies and only allowed their own kind of stories to make it to the bookstore shelves. Well, eventually I stopped trying and gave up on the genres. I figured it was me. I was no longer a child and I had to put away childish things. But a few years ago, I read about the Sad Puppies. I think the link was at PJ Media. After reading about the Hugo Awards and the way nominations were only handed out to those who fit the club and wrote only right-think it all clicked. I read all I could about the Puppies and started picking up some of their books. And they were good! Of course, not everything was great. Some was just okay. But all of it was recognizable as sf&f. And there was a community of people who believed in writing stories and not social justice agit-prop. And they had websites where like-minded individuals could talk and discuss writing and stuff they liked without having to get approval from the better sort. And I heard them talk about what it used to be like before the Puppy movement, how everyone had to kowtow to the better sort and if you wanted to get ahead you had to like the right sort of stories and hold the right kind of ideas. And how even if you went through this kabuki act you still had to wait your turn and if you had the wrong plumbing and skin tone chances were you wouldn’t ever get a shot at the brass ring.

But what really sounded familiar was how everyone had to hate the same things. There was an orthodoxy and if you didn’t hate George Bush and the military and straight white men, then you were cast out. And that I recognized. It was the same group-think I had seen on the photography sites. These were the same people. The Artists.

And it got me thinking. If the Puppies could do it for sf&f why couldn’t I make a photography site where right-wing opinion wasn’t something you had to hide. Now I wasn’t looking for some kind of gated community where only right-wing right think was allowed. But a place where I wouldn’t have to hear a two minute hate every time Donald Trump’s name was in the news.

So that’s kind of my whole reason for making this site in a nutshell ( a very long 1900 word nutshell). I wanted this site to allow me to discuss right-wing issues both seriously and with a little humor. That’s for all those folks who agree with me politically but don’t speak my language on hobbies.

And for those who happen to also have an interest in either sf&f or photography it’s a place where I could talk about those things. And other general things like tv and movies and other culture topics with like-minded people. So, if any of those things interest you stop by and have a look and leave a comment.

And finally after the revolution when I am elevated to the highest circles of the new order, hopefully in the movie version of my life story I’ll be played by Ryan Reynolds and Morena Baccarin will play Camera Girl. And they really should include “Angel in the Morning” in the soundtrack but absolutely nothing by Wham! They really suck.

Google is in the news. They are demonetizing and de-platforming the haters. And who are the haters? Whoever they say they are. And so is PayPal and Patreon and GoFundMe and on a less important front so is Facebook, Twitter and all the other leftists who are still smarting over Trump’s win. If you make money from monetizing your website through Google advertising then this can be a big deal. If you have a YouTube channel you could find a stream of income that you’ve depended on shut off. And it’s not something you can appeal. If they shut you down, that’s it.

I’ve been reading on a few sites that alternative sources for monetizing and funding are coming into being. For instance a payment site to replace Patreon ( amusingly named Hatreon) now exists. Stripe and Square perform similarly to PayPal but haven’t been banning rightwingers (yet). WeSearchr and Counter.Fund also provide crowdsourcing to the right. Gab provides a Twitter alternative.

So, problem solved? Probably not. Google is a behemoth of a company that controls the lion’s share of internet advertising. They also dominate the search business. And this is the way to control what gets seen and what doesn’t. If they think your site is guilty of thoughtcrime all they have to do is make it invisible and it will dry up and wither away. That is a big problem. There are other search engines like Brave and DuckDuckGo and, and, and … But most people google things they’re looking for. What’s a deplorable to do?

Well, mostly wait. We should start using all the alternatives because we need to make a start. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you can move a mountain with a teaspoon overnight. There’s no magic bullet for 100 years of ignoring the problem. These institutions are entrenched and they don’t like you and they want you to go away (meaning drop dead).

One thing we can and should do is network. Find like-minded folks and communicate and support each other. If they sell stuff, look at it. If it’s as good or even almost as good as stuff from the pod people buy it instead. And when you do buy from them let them know why. And if you have stuff for them to buy let them know and maybe they will. Support these alternative institutions and spread the word. Put links on your site if you find something good.

And it’s not all gloom and doom. Look at the Dragon Awards. Only two years running and already it is a fantastic alternative to voting in the fully converged Hugo Awards. I used to waste money voting in that thing. And that money was then spent on feeding SJWs at the WorldCon. Instead I can vote in the Dragon Awards for free and have a much greater impact. And that is a direct result of the puppies (sad and rabid) standing up to the pod people and saying we don’t believe you and we’ll go our own way.

So, there are cracks in the wall. And if you apply pressure at these weak points damage can be done. And don’t forget, Trump isn’t a friend of Silicon Valley. They don’t like him and he doesn’t like them. If he sics the anti-trust dogs on them Google will grovel pretty quickly. It will be interesting to see if the investigation into search algorithm tampering is resurrected.

So be of good cheer and go out and deplore with a smile on your face and a song in your heart. Somewhere out there in the bowels of Google the pod people are beginning to fear you.

The results have been announced and just as with last year, the Hugos have been shown once again to be way outside the mainstream. Of course, not everything I voted for won. But enough did and enough other stuff that did win was at least recognizable as SF&F. Sure, there’s some stuff written by SJW allies but at least it was stuff people actually buy so the really egregious stuff was passed over completely. Here’s the complete list:

Kudos to the winners and especially to Larry and the other puppies, sad and rabid, for starting the fire in that dumpster known as the Hugos. Like anything that’s been shown defective the Hugos have been replaced with something that actually works.

I will continue my diatribe here and show how Asimov devolved from an anthropocentric viewpoint to a proponent of the hive mind.

In 1950 Asimov had a short story called Misbegotten Missionary. In the story an exploratory mission from Earth visits a world named Saybrook’s Planet that is populated by communal creatures. Although these creatures take on all the forms needed to make up an ecosystem (microbes, plants and animals) they are all part of one consciousness. In addition, any one of these creatures has the ability to alter all creatures around it so that all their offspring will be communal creatures too. The explorers took precautions to protect their ship from contamination by any biological contact. But unbeknownst to them a solitary creature has stowed away on the ship and is waiting to reach Earth to begin the conversion process. It somehow realizes that the earth creatures monitor bacteria and the mice that they have on board to detect contamination by an alien life form. Because of this the creature refrains from altering any of the ship’s life forms to avoid tipping off the crew. The creature is cryptic and disguises itself as a piece of wire in an electrical circuit on the ship. By the kind of remarkable luck that only happens in fiction (or the 2016 presidential election) the wire that the creature is connected to is in the circuit to open the ship door. So instead of converting earth to communalism he gets fried like a death row inmate in Florida. The conclusion has the crew discover the bullet they dodged and everyone breaths a sigh of relief.

Apparently, Asimov was unhappy with this result. So, 32 years later he corrected this mistake in the Foundation sequel, Foundation’s Edge. Searching for a mysterious unseen hand in the Foundation universe he follows clues that lead to Sayshell (not Saybrook’s Planet) where he learns of the existence of Gaia, a communal intelligence that not only is composed of all the living things on the planet but also the inanimate components too. Now of course, this reeks of James Lovelock’s trendy 1970’s theory, The Gaia Hypothesis, that Earth was one big super-organism that had become infected with the human virus (thus the Matrix, thus Al Gore). Apparently, Asimov had bought into this theory and saw a harmonization (read Borgian assimilation) of humanity by the communal organism as the perfect solution. And just to make sure no one thinks assimilation is soul extinguishing oblivion, he shows us a human component of the collective who is a cheerful woman who happens to like the protagonist. So, you see, if you glue a smiley face onto the Borg it’s all good. And just to make sure no connection to Saybrook’s Planet is possible, the protagonist in Foundation’s Edge is not forced into the hive but gets to choose whether humanity is melted into a collective consciousness with igneous rocks and hydrogen atoms. You see it’s totally okay!

Asimov displays all the symptoms of the proto-sjw that he was. He dislikes individualism. He admires the hive. He desires to remove choice from the currently free. And he dislikes all this random doing what you want to do (except probably for himself of course). And finally to hammer home the lesson that humans can’t be left to their own devices we find out that Earth is a radioactive corpse and the whole Gaia situation is a master plan put together by a super-intelligent robot to try to save humans from themselves.

So my question is, what the hell happened to this doofus? And of course, the answer is he just followed the same trajectory as most of the progressives from the thirties who admired the Soviet Union before the Cold War. Now, Heinlein started out in that camp too. But when he changed wives and married a conservative he changed course and rejected the hive. I remember in his novel Methusaleh’s Children Heinlein has a world where a race exists that also possesses a collective mind. And the humans also had to make a choice. If they remained they would be assimilated. Only those who feared death remained. Obviously, these collective races are the communists. Heinlein rejected it. Asimov finally embraced it, much to his detriment as a writer and a man. But it did finally earn him a Hugo. So apparently the Hugo had also made the transition by that time.

Any fear that the annual Hugo debacle would be called off on account of boredom is allayed. Vox has posted his slate and it includes the now obligatory dinosaur buggery story. But there has been tactical change. The E Pluribus Hugo rules change means that attempting to monopolize every nominee spot is futile. So for the most part a single nominee is listed for each category. Some but not all of the nominees are Castalia House authors. For the VFM of Vox Day these choices (including “Alien Stripper Boned from Behind By the T-Rex” by Stix Hiscock!) are a duty that allows for no substitution. For others, these are a list of suggestions that provide choices that don’t correspond to a social justice slate. I’ve found Castalia House a very reliable source of enjoyable fiction. But of course, one man’s meat is another’s poison, so decide for yourself.
One interesting development that may or may not be related, Vox included File 770 as a pick for BEST FANZINE but that blog asked to be left out. Now, File 770 despises Vox and all things Puppy, so possibly this is one of those reactionary withdrawals but who knows?
So, I’ve got some reading to do. Although I can confirm that Deadpool would already be my choice for “BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM” (movie). I await also the lists that the Sad Puppies put out. These new choices from the various puppies, sad and rabid, are a boon to old timers like me who decades ago despaired of ever seeing old time fantasy and science fiction. If you are of a like mind I recommend you give the puppy choices a look see.

I just finished this first volume in a series named “The Stars Came Back” and I’m sure I’ll be reading the sequel when it appears. The back cover says that the series “combines military science fiction with the classic space western” and I will agree. The universe that this book inhabits has humans spread out on over a thousand planets. These worlds were terraformed during an expansion era that ended with a supernova occurring nearby that disrupted faster than light (FTL) travel for an extended period of time and threw these new worlds on their own devices to survive (or perish).

The various inhabited planets we see or hear about contain bits and pieces of one or more Earth cultures. One of the problems that seems to exist in most of the locales we see is a bureaucracy that preys on the citizens using stifling regulation to punish citizens monetarily and otherwise. The tone of the book shows a preference for more personal freedom and less government interference.

The main characters become involved in a project to rehabilitate an unusual transport ship that brings together military and civilian personnel in an interesting cooperation that slowly unfolds some puzzling characteristics of this odd “Flying Dutchman.” The cast is a mixture of men, women, a child and even an AI who runs the ship. The military component of the story I found most engaging. The interaction of the NCO with the recruits and his officers is familiar and adds the familial attachment and common cause aspects of the story that makes mil sf so enjoyable for many. There are several battles both on planet and off that I thought were well done. I found most of the characters engaging. It will be interesting to see how the various interpersonal dynamics work themselves out over the course of the series. And, of course, the secrets of the ship will be interlaced with them.

So, I’ll give an enthusiastic endorsement to “Back from the Dead” and recommend it to anyone who enjoys classic sf and especially mil sf.

On Monday, I received an e-mail from “Hugo Awards 2017” that said, “I’m very glad to be able to tell you that nominations for the 2017 Hugo Awards are now open! As a member of MAC2, you are eligible to nominate in the 17 Hugo ballot categories covering the best of the genre in the last year, and for the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer.” And, so continues a five-year tradition of melodrama and degradation almost unparalleled in the annals of genre literature buffoonery. Yes, the pageantry and butt-hurt that is the puppy-era Hugo Awards is back again. Huzzah!

And I think we have reached a new stage in this evolution. Everyone realizes that rapprochement is impossible and now it’s just a matter of how much infamy can be heaped on your opponents. From the point of view of the puppies’ side (sides?), winning Hugos isn’t seriously considered as an objective. The folks at Tor have shown that their allies in the media can crank out a blitz of news pieces tarring the puppy side as deplorables and this will inspire enough people into battling the reprobates with no-award votes and assuring that some of the Tor books will win. And the puppies (mostly the rabid variety) will be able to slate a number of bizarre nominations (Space Raptor Butt Invaders!) to make the Hugos appear ridiculous and simultaneously put a monkey wrench in Tor’s system of rewarding lower level authors with unsuccessful Hugo nominations.

So, there is a sort of a stand-off. It’s like one of those Three Stooges routines where Moe, Larry and Curly are locked down into some kind of circle-slap-fest. They’re each almost exhausted but there’s no way to exit the contest. Now I say this in full realization that I’m Curly and, of course, I want to beat Moe so, let the eye poking proceed.

Actually, there’s kind of a comforting feel to the procedure. It must have been like this in the middle stages of the trench warfare during WWI. You had progressed past the belief that a charge would result in anything but mass casualties so you settled down to lobbing shells and poison gas canisters. You knew your script and hating the Hun was easy and kinda fun (except for the dysentery and shrapnel).

This year I’ll follow the venomous fun and nominate the stories I’ve enjoyed. But I can’t care very much if the cabal gets a few awful stories awarded. On the other hand I’m looking forward to the Dragons. Last year was surprising. Without the negativity I felt almost disoriented. An award ceremony without pomposity. It seemed like some guilty pleasure.

Anyway, I have to confess that after the vote in November it’s a little difficult to get upset about the Hugos. What I’m hoping for this year is a Trump themed campaign. Maybe a YouTube video entitled “Make the Hugos Great Again.” Possibly Milo Yiannopoulis could write a novella entitled “If You Were a Deplorable My Love.”

So there it is. The Hugos have become a kind of tradition where the event is almost completely antithetical to the intent. Sort of like watching Dick Clark’s Rocking New Years’ Eve after there’s no Dick Clark or Rock and Roll and you really can’t remember why you want to stay up on New Year’s Eve and watch Mariah Carey lip-synch her songs in a spandex sausage casing. So, the Hugos aren’t actually about picking the best sf&f stories anymore but instead a cautionary tale about what happens when the patients take over the asylum.

But in the words of George Constanza, “You wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts!”